If these data were the basis of decision-making through direct democracy, the space program would have been shut down in 1973, but would be continued today. It is possible to weight data from the general public, to give some people more influence than others. For example educated people and those who score higher on tests of scientific knowledge favor the space program more. We have already seen how advocates of fluid democracy plan to identify and empower opinion leaders. However, there is a different but highly compatible approach, seeking to identify the general values served by some government program or policy decision, and measure how important those particular values are to the public at large, even if they do not currently understand the specific issue at hand. Then, professional experts would go through a similar but more complex process to decide how to achieve those goals.
I chose the space program as my example, because years ago I did a pilot study to explore some of the methods needed (Bainbridge 1991*). The inspiration was the intense experience of being at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the time of the Challenger space shuttle disaster in 1986, and sharing the horror of all the people there who had dedicated their lives to space exploration. Lacking funding, I was in no position to survey the general public, but the rather knowledgeable students of Harvard University were available to serve as respondents. I administered two very different questionnaires. The first one consisted largely of open-ended questions, where respondents were encouraged to write a number of possible goals for the space program, and 1,007 students did so. Their responses were then typed into a computer, although classification was done manually because today’s natural language clustering programs were not yet available.
The second questionnaire asked respondents to rate each of 125 different possible space goals, which had been derived from the first questionnaire, on a scale saying how good a reason each one was for continuing the space program. Because the data matrix for 125 variables x 125 variables x 894 respondents was too big for the social science statistical software available at the time, I wrote my own clustering program to extract the fundamental values being served by the space program as reflected in how the respondents grouped the items implicitly. For example, military values were distinct from scientific ones, which in turn were distinct from idealistic goals. This pilot study was reported in a book, which is now available online. [6]
This process can be carried out very effectively online today. In 1999, a massive online questionnaire study sponsored by the National Geographic Society, called Survey 2000 (Witte, Amoroso, and Howard 2000*; Bainbridge 2004*), included an open-ended question I developed asking people to write a brief prediction about the year 2100: “ Imagine the future and try to predict how the world will change over the next century. Think about everyday life as well as major changes in so ciety, culture, and technology. ” About 20,000 people responded, and after considerable analysis of their written text, 2,000 formal questionnaire items resulted. I wrote them into a Windows-based computer program that anyone can use to explore their own conceptions of the future, freely available online. [7] In connection with fluid democracy, this study suggests one way in which the general public can be polled to identify issues of concern to them, of course using a variety of open-ended questions appropriate for a range of policy areas, and even larger number of respondents than a mere 20,000.
While it is very important to develop a new political system that can adjust the balance between direct democracy and representative democracy, the decisions of legislatures are only one early stage in political decision making. The study of space goals can illustrate this. Table 3 lists 14 space goals, out of a preliminary list of 49, which clustered together correlationally as revealed by a factor analysis. The data came from a 1977 pilot study of 225 American voters who lived in the Seattle, Washington area, data collected with the able help of Richard Wyckoff who at that time was a graduate student. This was only a pilot study, and the 1986 study was more extensive, yet because it polled voters the 1977 study seems symbolically appropriate to use here. The factor loading for an item represents essentially the correlation between the item and the underlying but unmeasured concept that unites the group, so we can see that the fundamental idea focuses on human colonization of the solar system. The popularity of each item is the percent of voters calling it an extremely good or moderately good reason for supporting the space program.
Table 3: Visionary Space Exploration Goals
| Benefit of the Space Program | Factor Loading | Popularity |
|---|---|---|
| Overpopulation on Earth can be solved by using the living space on other planets | 0.70 | 24.9% |
| Space travel will lead to the planting of human colonies on new worlds in space. | 0.70 | 24.3% |
| Society has a chance for a completely fresh start in space; new social forms and exciting new styles of life can be created on other worlds. | 0.66 | 24.0% |
| Raw materials from the moon and other planets can supplement the dwindling natural resources of the Earth. | 0.63 | 50.9% |
| Our world has become too small for human civilization and for the human mind; we need the wide open spaces of the stars and planets to get away from the confines of our shrinking world. | 0.59 | 17.6% |
| Spaceflight is necessary to ensure the survival of the human race against destruction by natural or man-made disaster. | 0.57 | 25.6% |
| Human societies have always needed to expand in order to remain healthy; space is the only direction left for such expansion | 0.56 | 31.4% |
| We must go beyond the finite Earth into infinite space in order to continue economic growth without limit. | 0.54 | 20.7% |
| Space hospitals put into orbit where there is no gravity will be able to provide new kinds of medical treatment and give many patients easier recoveries. | 0.53 | 50.70% |
| Commercial manufacturing can be done in space without polluting the Earth; completely new materials and products can be made in space. | 0.47 | %40.6 |
| Communication with intelligent beings from other planets would give us completely new perceptions of humanity, new art, philosophy, and science. | 0.44 | 55.3% |
| We can conduct certain dangerous kinds of scientific experiment far in space so accidents and other hazards will not harm anyone. | 0.42 | 36.2% |
| Without spaceflight we would be trapped, closed-in, jailed on this planet. | 0.41 | 14.7% |
| Rockets developed for spaceflight will be used for very rapid transportation of people, military equipment, or commercial goods over long distances on the Earth. | 0.38 | 49.1% |
*
Bainbridge, William Sims. 1991. Goals in Space: American Values and the Future of Technology. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press.